These paintings show my exploration into using cardboard as a larger surface than I have done in the past, part of the reason I decided to attempt a larger piece of work was to experiment with my new oil sticks. I found that upon using oil sticks on corrugated cardboard, it was a struggle to get a smooth uninterrupted line due to the textures surface, this could be seen as an obstacle to overcome but also possibly a tool at times. I don’t feel like these are particularly well informed or successful paintings or pieces of work, I suppose it was more of just an open space to experiment with new ideas for me. In the first painting I was aiming to see how I would feel about a piece of work that uses mainly primary colours, I quite liked this effect as I feel like it gave a child like nature to the piece. I  used an ink roller pen to create one line drawings, sometimes blind drawings on the surface and try to incorporate them as a piece of the painting, I also took the end of a paintbrush and scratched into some wet paint and wet oil stick creating some hidden text, I think this was visually interesting and added depth. Though I don’t consider these paints to be successful, I would say they achieved my aim of helping me be more experimental and discover some likes and dislikes so in that sense they were successful.

When completing my life drawings I added details and depth using alcohol markers which have a tendency to bleed through the paper, so I was only using half of the paper in my sketchbook and thought it could be interesting to incorporate these reverse drawings into some abstract creations. I think they were very productive and helped translate into my later paintings.

To begin my studio practice 5 and get ideas flowing I spent a week producing a collection of figure drawings. I understand this is very different to my work up until this point but I have always intended to gain some practice in figure drawing as I feel to succesfully create abstraction of bodily matters it is important to first understand more traditional bodily representations. I stuck to quite bold and bright colours and less traditional artist materials such as gel pens and gel crayons to see what inspiration might be sparked by these formal relations.

From this point on all of the posts below are from my Studio Practice Four